Connecticut Commentary: Red Notes from a Blue State

Murphy Seeking to puncture his shifting public political positions, Winston Churchill once characterized Clement Atlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing.” Historian and polemicist Victor Davis Hanson has said of President Joe Biden that he is the most radical president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but Hanson has yet to characterize Biden as a “wolf in wolf’s clothing.” Generally regarded in Connecticut and nationally as a money-maker for Democrats, U.S. Senator Chris Murphy has been able to stretch his legs between political right-left poles without ripping his pants. He has been a spokesman for the left in his party for many years – a wolf in wolf’s clothing -- without suffering adverse political repercussions from moderate Democrats, Independents or Republicans in Connecticut, known around these parts as “The Land of Steady Habits.” To put it in other words, Murphy has become a steady habit at a time when Connecticut has veered sharply left. There is little doubt that Connect...

To remember one who has died is a prayer – Soren Kierkegaard For Memorial Day 2024, Connecticut Commentary is pleased to direct the reader’s attention to “ A letter to Major Donnelly's son ” that appeared in July 2005. Memorial Day is, at the name suggests, a day set aside to remember our warrior heroes. Many men and women in service carry their wounds home with them when they leave service. On Major Donnelly’s retirement, I brought my mother and wife with me to welcome him home upon his return. Both were wondrously affected, but we did not know at that moment how deep and fatal his wound was. His obituary in the Hartford Courant mentions that Donnelly died, age 46, “after a relentless ten-year battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.” During his 15 years as a fighter pilot, “he flew first the A-10 Warthog and then the F-16 Falcon. During Operation Desert Storm he completed 44 F-16 combat missions over Iraq as a member of the...

Markley and Samson Courts, acting to preserve constitutional prerogatives, provide a great service to the public when they put a bit in the mouth of unelected, runaway, quasi-legislative agencies acting all too often on behalf of powerful political incumbents. And the Connecticut Supreme Court did just in a recent unanimous decision involving former State Senator Joe Markley, current State Senator Rob Samson, and Connecticut’s State Election Enforcement Commission. There are several enduring lessons that should be drawn from the decision, many of them mentioned by Markey and Samson in a recent media release. For those whose interest may have flagged during the past seven years, the court’s decision reinforced constitutional rights of free speech endangered by an increasingly aggressive partisan party apparatus. Their decision in Markley v. State Elections Enforcement Commission was seven years in the making. Those seven long years hang like a menacing cloud over our political sys...

Connecticut and national politics is becoming a game of rote and numbers. As part of his 2024 presidential campaign, Joe Biden traveled to Morehead College in Kentucky to reassure Black students that his administration had not forgotten them. Some critics asserted that the Morehouse event had been used by Biden to spread a message to a wider audience – anti-Israeli mobs storming various credulous college student bodies, young voters turning away, according to polls, from their Daddy’s Democrat Party, and a click-dependent left oriented national media. National polls showing Biden sinking in the estimation of American Black voters put a spring in his faltering 81-year-old step. This, in part, is what Biden said of the Republican Party: The Democrat Party -- not the party of Abe Lincoln and Frederick Douglass -- is the party of forward movement among Blacks. The Republican Party is anchored in an outmoded past, systemically racist, and led by MAGA Yahoos. Past voting patterns sh...

Douglas Fredrick Douglass has much to teach us about what slavery and prejudice is, how to combat both and, most importantly, how to secure our human liberty. A critic once slammed G. K. Chesterton’s view of the world as upside down. Chesterton responded that the world of his day was upside down and, to view it properly, one must stand on one’s head. Douglas stood on his feet and saw within reach a vision of the world that was his constant companion. Douglas’ letter to Thomas Auld, once his slave master, rights an upside down world. Douglas published his letter in North Star, an abolitionist newspaper he had founded in 1847. Even at six years old, Douglas, then a slave, was perplexed when he had asked himself why he was a slave. Sometime later, “I heard some of the old slaves talking of their parents having been stolen from Africa by white men, and were sold here as slaves. The whole mystery was solved at once. Very soon after this my Aunt Jinny and Uncle Noah ran away, and the ...

John B Larson Homepage Social Insecurity to Go Bankrupt by 2035 A reliable analysis from the horse’s mouth, the Social Security Board of Trustees – not a MAGA outfit -- indicates social security’s main trust fund will flatline around 2035. The trust fund, the asset reserves of the Federal Old Age and Survivors Insurance and the Disability Insurance   trust funds, will be depleted by 2035, around the same time survivors of the Biden administration are due to celebrate their victory over the assassination of the internal combustion engine. There are different reactions to this distressing news, depending on one’s place in the political scheme of things. Some multi-term incumbent politicians likely will not be in office when final rites over Social Security are read. Here in Connecticut, Democrat politicians who have held office for more than 30 years – U.S. Representatives Rosa DeLauro and John Larson, for instance -- may not be present to witness the calamitous results of th...

Michael Cohen, a former Trump “fixer,” is at the center of the only Trump trial likely to bear fruit before the upcoming 2024 presidential election. The other cases against Trump have been, not unexpectedly, delayed until the election has been concluded. Polls, the sour state of the U.S. economy, a suppurating southern border admitting into the United States millions of illegal aliens, and foreign policy blunders by the Biden administration, all suggest that former President Donald Trump may prevail in the election, grievously disappointing Democrats, some of whom have warned the architects of the Biden campaign that it is not always catastrophic to change a horse in the middle of the political stream -- if the horse cannot bear the weight of a presidential election. New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg brought the case against Trump after federal prosecutors refused to issue an indictment. Some over-scrupulous legal analysts insist that Bragg had no authority under the U....

Murphy Carthago delenda est [Carthage must be destroyed] – Cato the Elder U.S. Senator Chris Murphy always has been a stalwart soldier in President Joe Biden’s army of progressive polemicists. But Biden‘s recent withholding of arms for Israel is, even for a practiced polemicist, an attempt to square a political circle. It is perfectly plain to all that Israel will never be safe from terrorist molestations unless Hamas and other Iran supported terrorists groups are militarily defeated. Biden’s recent decision to deny offensive arms to Israel is an attempt – some would say for political reasons – to put some distance between himself and Israel’s war Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. If at the beginning of the war between Hamas and Israel, Biden had claimed that the United States “has Israel’s back,” his imprudent decision to deny military aid and U.S. Congressional appropriated funds to Israel at war can only represent a step back from Israel’s exposed back. Following the October...

It was sainted President Barack Obama who was credited in a Politico piece in 2020 with having said about his Vice President Joe Biden, “Never underestimate Biden’s ability to f***k things up.” The quote was attributed to an unnamed Politico source, but it comes down to us fresh as the day it was uttered, mainly because President Joe Biden has valiantly continued to screw things up. Robert Gates, who served in both the Bush and Obama administrations as Secretary of Defense, retiring in 2011, said of Biden, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue for the past four decades.” A botched withdrawal from Afghanistan that surrendered Bagram Air Force base to the Taliban was a major screw up. An average of the year-over-year inflation rate for all months during the Biden administration of 5.7 percent is a major screw up. The same rate under Biden’s predecessor was 1.9 percent, according to Investopedia. Biden perversely seems not to un...

Looney The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin – Mark Twain CTMirror tells us that the friends of labor have produced a bill “expanding paid sick days” in Connecticut. The bill, then awaiting Governor Ned Lamont’s promised signature, was greeted with loud hosannas by   pro-union members of the General Assembly, most exuberantly by Connecticut’s answer to Vermont socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, state Senate President Martin M. Looney, D-New Haven. “Sen. Julie Kushner, D-Danbury, who lobbied for the original law as a UAW [United Auto Workers Labor Union] regional executive and ran for the Senate in 2018 on a promise to expand the coverage, called the passage timely, if not overdue,” according to the CTMirror story. Looney said of the bill, “This is a landmark bill for the 2024 session, one that a number of us have worked on for a long time.” The bill is an “expansion” of a prior bill passed in 2011 that, Kushner...

The big three, Looney, Lamont, Ritter “No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session,” said Mark Twain. The life, liberty and property of Connecticut residents will be safe after May 8, 2024 when the General Assembly packs it in for the fiscal year. Of course, the General Assembly will reconvene in February, at which time the life, liberty and property of Connecticut citizens once again will be put in jeopardy. Some prospective bills never make it from the drawing board. Such was a bill, championed by environmentalists and politicians seeking to make hay from California’s attempt to outlaw the sale of internal combustion engines after 2035. A measure to replicate in Connecticut California’s stringent laws and regulations concerning environmental tidiness has now been put off until the current 2024 elections have concluded. “In a surprising move,” the Hartford Courant tells us, “House Speaker Matt Ritter said that the legislature will not vote...

Lamont, Biden, Hayes Can you be a populist without being popular? Of course you can, sometimes. Can you be a populist if you talk like a member of Harvard’s Law faculty? Not likely. Bill Buckley, free of the stain of populism, once said he would rather be governed by the first hundred people picked at random from a phone book than the Harvard Law faculty. However, populism is not merely a matter of tone. Your mother – well, at least my mother – was engaging in populist rhetoric when she told you a couple of times every week, “You will be judged by the company you keep.” That sentiment, before the 1960s disturbed our increasingly secular moral universe, was widely shared – in a word, popular. Mom delivered most of her apothegms in the common tongue, as did her mother and her mother’s mother. Common sense spilled out of her like wine from pressed grapes. Despite his riches and vulgar gold toilets, former President Donald Trump -- vilified every Monday, Wednesday and Friday by the Har...

Matt Ritter CTExaminer State House Speaker Matt Ritter is shocked – SHOCKED! Connecticut is awash in Wall Street money, and the extra bennies from Wall Street will enable Connecticut to pay down a slender portion of its pension debts. “This” – the unanticipated boost in state revenue -- Ritter said, “might be the most shocking consensus revenue numbers we’ve seen in years. Positive, yes. Right now, we’re in good times. Yes, it is [Wall Street] money, so we’ll have to continue to talk about that as we go forward. If I hear the word ‘deficit’ – folks, the state is in a very solid financial position.” Ritter, of course is talking about Connecticut’s most recent budget, and his joy is dampened by doubt. The Yankee Institute told us in late June of 2021, “According to Connecticut’s 2020 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report, the state’s unfunded pension liabilities for state employees, teachers and judges sits at roughly $40 billion,” a mountain, not a mole hill. “And, according to...